Confabulation
The failure mode in which synthetic or imagined events become indistinguishable from observed facts, corrupting the world model and memory substrate with unverified content. The dream engine prevents confabulation by tagging all synthetic events and blocking them from the episodic truth layer.
Confabulation - borrowing the neuroscience term for confident but false memories - is the primary risk of the dream engine. When a cognitive system generates hypothetical scenarios to test world-model predictions, those scenarios must never be allowed to mix with records of what actually happened. If synthetic experience events were stored in the episodic truth layer alongside real ones, the world model would train on imagined outcomes, the reinforcement engine would update weights based on fictional results, and retrieval would surface fabricated context as if it were fact. The architecture prevents this with strict synthetic tagging at the point of generation and hard barriers that prevent synthetic events from crossing into the episodic truth layer. The audit stream records all synthetic events separately, making the boundary auditable.